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Inspector Gadget
1999 · Film · 78 min
Directed by David Kellogg
John Brown is a bumbling but well-intentioned security guard who is badly injured in an explosion planned by an evil mastermind. He is taken to a laboratory, where Brenda, a leading robotics surgeon, replaces his damaged limbs with state-of-the-art gadgets and tools. Named "Inspector Gadget" by the press, John -- along with his niece, Penny, and her trusty dog, Brain -- uses his new powers to discover who was behind the explosion.
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The Wikipedia article for 1999 in film is there for all to see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_in_film#1999_Wide-release_films
Between The King and I (Disney animated), Baby Geniuses, Doug's 1st Movie, 10 Things I Hate About You, Wing Commander, The Rage: Carrie 2, My Favorite Martian, and Office Space, I see plenty of sequels, low-effort trash, and remakes. And that's just stuff that came out in the first three months of the year.
edit: We got a remake of Wild Wild West, a remake of Tarzan, a sequel to Austin Powers, a sequel to The Brave Little Toaster, a prequel to Star Wars, and our second Shakespear adapation of the year in months 4-6.
double edit: In 7-9, we got another Muppet movie, an Inspector Gadget remake, The Haunting and The Thomas Crown Affair were both remakes, a Universal Soldier sequel, and a Dudley Do-Right remake.
I have no interest in continuing to analyze this list, thing were just as bad twenty years ago
Perhaps worse than the death of Flash was the death of Shockwave. I feel like so many Shockwave games I played back in the day are completely gone with no reference to them on the modern internet. Today, you can install some version of Flash on most operating systems, but I don't think there's any modern standalone Shockwave player and I could only get the plugin to work in Safari on macOS. Chrome and Firefox don't even run those types of plugins anymore.
There's one particular Shockwave game that I was recently able to recover from the depths of the Wayback Machine, which was a game from Disney for the Inspector Gadget movie; terrible film, but their website had this nifty little game that wasn't necessarily difficult but was addicting in that I wanted to see just how far I could go with it. For years I thought it was gone for good, and was glad to finally see it again after I lost it 15+ years ago.
Here it is in all its 1999 glory: https://web.archive.org/web/20031017000018/http://www.disney.co.uk:80/gadget/repair.html
I always liked it in part because I don't think I've seen a similar game. It's kind of like if you took the random shapes part of Tetris and added a "jigsaw puzzle" element.
I think it's because they turned a website list into a 60 billion dollar company in about 5 years. And one investor in the early days was Masayoshi Son, and he was once the second richest person in the world in 1999.
And that advert in the film Inspector Gadget.
It's not worth a corporate biography book, I admit.
[Edit] And after the dotcom crash, their market cap (in 2006/2007) was just half of its peak, quite impressive. And they never chickened out and bought, say, Disney. They stuck to their guns.